Ina Garten-Inspired Brownie Pudding
This is the dessert people most often overbake, because they test it the way they test everything else.
A clean skewer means you have failed. Brownie pudding is meant to come out of the oven with a set, crackled top over a centre that is still liquid — somewhere between a soufflé and a chocolate sauce. Push a skewer in and it should come out coated in wet batter. Bake it until the skewer is clean and you have made a perfectly nice chocolate cake, which is not what this is.
Set the timer, trust it, and take it out while it still looks underdone.
Jump to the recipe ↓Ina Garten-Inspired Brownie Pudding
Serves 8 · Dessert
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 1 hr
- Total
- 1 hr 30 min
Moderate7 steps, a technique that commonly fails
Ingredients
- 200 g butter, melted and cooled
- 4 eggs, room temperature
- 400 g caster sugar
- 80 g cocoa powder, sifted
- 60 g plain flour
- 1 tbsp vanilla extract
- 2 tsp espresso powder
- 1/2 tsp kosher salt
Method
- Heat the oven to 160°C (140°C fan). Butter a 2 litre baking dish and put the kettle on.
- Whisk the eggs and sugar , until pale and tripled and falling in a ribbon.5–8 minutes
- Sift the cocoa and flour together and fold them in gently, keeping the air.
- Fold in the vanilla, espresso powder, salt and the cooled melted butter.
- Pour into the dish. Sit it in a roasting tin and add boiling water halfway up the sides.
- Bake exactly. The top will be set and cracked; a skewer will come out wet.55–60 minutes
- Rest and serve warm, spooned rather than cut.15 minutes
The water bath is doing the real work
The dish sits in a roasting tin of hot water, so the sides cannot go above 100°C however hot the oven is. That is what lets the outside set gently while the middle stays molten. Without it the edges bake into a dry crust long before the centre has done anything at all, and the contrast — which is the entire dessert — disappears.
Beat the eggs and sugar until they are pale
Five to eight minutes on medium, until the mixture has tripled and falls from the whisk in a ribbon. This is the only aeration in the recipe and it is also what produces the thin crackled crust on top: dissolved sugar rises during baking and sets into a meringue-like film. Under-beaten eggs give you no crust and a heavy, greasy centre.
Cool the melted butter first
Hot butter poured into a whisked egg foam cooks the eggs on contact and knocks the air straight out of them. Melt it early and let it come back to barely warm before it goes in.
Storing
Three days in the fridge, and it firms up completely when cold — closer to a dense truffle cake than a pudding at that point, which is not a bad thing. Reheating individual portions for twenty seconds brings back some of the ooze.
Questions people ask
How do I know when it is done?
By the clock and by the top, not by a skewer. Fifty-five to sixty minutes, set and cracked on top, wet underneath.
Do I need the water bath?
Yes. Without it the edges overbake long before the centre is right.
Is the middle supposed to be runny?
Yes. That is the dessert.
Can I make it ahead?
Bake it to order if you can. It is a different, denser thing once chilled — still good, but not the same dish.
More like this
Ina Garten-Inspired Apple Crisp: Use Two ApplesOne variety that collapses into sauce and one that holds its shape. A single apple gives you either all mush or all chunks.
Ina Garten-Inspired Apple Tart: Slice Them Paper ThinNo thickener and no precooked filling. Sliced thin enough, the apples finish in exactly the time the puff pastry needs to rise.
Ina Garten-Inspired Blueberry Ricotta Cake: Drain ItSupermarket ricotta carries a lot of loose whey. Drain it in a sieve for an hour or the batter is too wet and the cake sinks.